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'Soft' ending cruels SA's cricket season

Joe Barton

South Australian coach Darren Berry told his team to toughen up following Saturday's eight-wicket capitulation to NSW, admitting the young squad wasn't ready to contest a Sheffield Shield final this year anyway.

The Redbacks were a strong chance to figure in the finals of all three formats but fell short at the final hurdle in every one - including an agonising two-wicket loss to Victoria in the one-day competition.

The loss at the SCG which ended their Shield season left a bitter taste in Berry's mouth, though he said they'd started to remove what he described as a culture of being easy beats.

But the former Victorian wicketkeeper was frank in assessing whether his team had blown their chance of winning a rare title this summer.

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"I'm extremely disappointed considering the opportunity that we had but to be perfectly honest with this group we've improved enormously this year," Berry said after the match.

"(This group) only got two points last year and to be honest we were bordering on easy beats and South Australia for a long period of time have been easy beats.

"So the coaching staff, myself and my two assistants, our role is to try and get this group to play a much tougher brand of cricket and a brand of cricket that's respected much more and I think we've gone a long way this year.

"(We had) 26 points coming into the last round, sure there's disappointment and frustrations in our rooms now that we had a chance to play in a Shield final and we missed that.

"But to be brutally honest I'm not convinced our group is ready for that yet. We've got a lot of inexperienced young blokes in the room."

The tough brand of cricket Berry has tried to instil was not on show as NSW's pace contingent ripped through their top order in both innings, as South Australia posted lacklustre scores of 182 and 127 in the heavy loss.

That prompted an hour-long debrief post-match in which South Australia's batting coach Jeff Vaughan accused his troops of failing to muscle up against NSW's young bowlers.

"Our batting coach just said that he felt that in a tough game we were soft," Berry said.

"And that was our batting coach's words and he said we need to be a much-improved and hardened batting group.

"If you look at our numbers this year, our bowling has been outstanding and Chadd Sayers deserves a lot of recognition."